THE SWEET SPOT

We are formed by experience, and the worse the experience, the more fully we are shaped.

“We get pleasure through contrast, by creating situations where the release from unpleasantness is its own source of pleasure,” writes Yale psychology professor Bloom, offering as examples the sensation of sinking gingerly into a hot bath and then enjoying the warmth or cutting the pain of a searing curry with a cold beer. Suffering, he argues, is important in our experience in that it lends meaning to life. Recognizing that there are degrees of suffering—he’s not talking about the suffering attendant in genocide, for example—Bloom adds that the contrast makes moments of happiness all the happier. As for the “unchosen,” horrific suffering of the Holocaust, Viktor Frankl observed that “those who had the best chance of survival were those whose lives had broader purpose.” In a book that is diffuse but coherent all the same, Bloom looks at numerous issues: the transitory nature of happiness, the self-inflicted pain of BDSM adepts, the hard work of writing a book or completing a degree. That author adds that not all “chosen” pain is educational or even healthy. BDSM may appeal to our “normal appetites,” but it’s on a spectrum that psychiatrists call “non-suicidal self-injury,” the kind of thing that can land a person in a psychiatric ward. Bloom is careful to define terms as he goes along, and he allows that one person’s meaning may not be another’s. He further notes that while suffering can lead to a positive outcome, that’s not always so: “Sometimes we overvalue it; sometimes we indulge too much.” The book is lucid and elegantly written throughout so that there’s little suffering involved in reading it—in this, it’s reminiscent of Michael Sandel and Martha Nussbaum.

A bracing, convincing argument that toil, torment, and tribulation can be good things.